CoreOS Linux comes out with Linux containers as a service!
CoreOS has launched a commercial service to ease the workload of systems administrators. The new commercial Linux distribution service can update automatically. Systems administrators do not have to perform any major update manually. Linux-based companies like RedHat and SUSE use open source and free applications and libraries for their operations, yet offer commercial subscription services for enterprise editions of Linux. These services cover software, updates, integration and technical support, bug fixes, etc.
CoreOS has a different strategy compared to competitive services offered by other players in the service, support and distribution industries. Users will not receive any major updates, since CoreOS wants to save you the hassle of manually updating all packages. The company plans to stream copies of updates directly to the OS. CoreOS has named the software ‘CoreUpdate’. It controls and monitors
software packages, their updates and also provides the controls to administrators to manually update a few packages if they want to. It has a roll-back feature in case an update causes any malfunction in a machine. CoreUpdate can manage multiple systems at a time.
CoreOS was designed to promote the use of open source OS kernel, which is used in a lot of cloud based virtual servers. The CoreOS consumes less than half of instance as compared to other Linux distribution services. Applications of distributions run in a virtualised container called Docker. They can start instantly. CoreOS was launched in December last year. It uses two partitions, which help in easily updating distributions. One partition contains the current OS, while the other is used to store the updated OS. This smoothens out the entire process of upgrading a package or an entire distribution. The service can be directly installed and run in the system or via cloud services like Amazon, Google or Rackspace. The venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, has invested over US$ 8 million in CoreOS. The company was also backed by Sequoia Capital and Fuel Capital in the past.